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MOOC4D Course Certificates have been despatched to all the eligible participants as of today (January 3, 2014). These have been sent via email to the ID registered on the class site (www.m4d-mooc.org). If you think you are eligible and have not received the certificate, please check the spam folder (and the "Promotional" or "social" tabs in Gmail).

We thank you for your continued participation. Course lectures for this week have been released on the online class site. In this final week, we thought we should draw your attention first to two important announcements:

Important

1. There will be a quiz next week and the Instructor will give an overview lecture to complete the course.

This week, we are looking both at the application space, namely, m-learning and agriculture, as well as at critical technology aspects. We start with two important talks on m-learning. Dr Aga Palalas tells us about social networking in m-learning. Professor Ally talks about the methods and considerations in setting up m-learning initiatives in your school, college, training institution or university. Professor Prabhakar introduces you to the content management part of a mobile service. You learnt about vKVK. It has a backend for content management called agropedia.

Looking ahead to week 3 we will shift focus to the backend. What happens when you make a phone call? How does your call/message gets routed to its destination? We talk about the telephone exchange of which you are aware. We will also talk about how the Web works and how it relates to mobile devices. As you noted in the introductory lectures, access to the Web via mobiles is rapidly increasing in developing countries. It is useful to know how these two technologies, apparently not related in popular thinking, are actually working together.

Learners, we thank you for your continuing participation in this course. We began Week 2 with a closer look at the mobile device. We considered how applications work in a smartphone. We also learnt how a mobile phone uses wireless communication technologies guaranteeing quality of voice and data traffic. In the course forums and chat rooms, we had very good participation.

We were very glad to begin Week 1 with a great deal of enthusiasm and participation from those who registered. Your participation last week brought a lot of value to the course. The discussions have been wide-ranging and some very good ideas have emerged from the participants. An example is the use of missed calls to help an individual who finds her/himself lost in the valleys or mountains of the Himalayas. Similar applications can be developed for countries and regions where tourism is an important source of income and revenue. Some more examples can be cited from the Forum discussions.